Tag Archive: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry

The Echo Beach label is known for its love of thick, modern dub and drifty reggae rhythms, and while Nu School of Planet Dub is filled to the brim with both, it’s a curio when it comes to Lee “Scratch” Perry‘s discography. The legendary dub producer’s contributions are merely vocals, mostly funky incantations or spirited damnations of Babylon, and all of them come from Return from Planet Dub, the 2009 album Perry cut with Austrian dub band Dubblestandart. Markus Kammann aka Robo Bass HiFi mixes the original cuts into dubstep and electro bangers, with “Fungus Rock” getting a bottom end somewhere between Burial and Skrillex, while “Island Girl” introduces the seductive and spacy sound of reggae-house. Ari Up’s vocals…

The mythology surrounding eccentric dub producer Lee “Scratch” Perry grew in no small part out of his relatively short-lived and tragically fated Black Ark Studio. Active between 1973-1979, the studio was home to the creation of some of Perry’s most legendary productions and the place where his experiments in audio alchemy took shape. An incredible amount of essential reggae tracks and untold amounts of dub mixes were set to tape at Black Ark before Perry allegedly burned the entire place down himself in the culmination of a long stretch of erratic, rum-fueled mania. Nearly 40 years after the strange and magical days of the Black Ark, Perry aimed to recapture some of that innovative spirit with Back on the Controls. Recording in a modernized London studio…